Today around eighty people turned out to support Zack Polanski, leader of the Greens, deliver a letter to Palantir, a major US technology company, demanding they withdraw from a £330 million seven year contract with the NHS.
What does Palantir do?
Palantir is a secretive American technology company that builds data integration and analysis software for large organizations, particularly governments, militaries (like the US ,UK and Israel), intelligence agencies, and corporations. It helps them make sense of massive, disparate datasets to support decisions in areas like defense, law enforcement, and healthcare. Its platforms, such as Gotham (defense/intel) and Foundry (commercial/civil), use AI to connect siloed data, enabling complex operations
In November 2023, NHS England awarded a consortium led by Palantir Technologies a contract to build and operate the Federated Data Platform (FDP). The FDP is designed to integrate fragmented NHS data across trusts and regional systems to improve patient care, reduce waiting lists, and optimize resource management./
Palantir Technologies works with the Israeli government. In January 2024, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply technology for “war-related missions”. Its technology is helping the Israeli Defence Force carry out an internationally recognised genocide.
So above all there is a moral and political question for this Labour government. Should our taxes be going in the pockets of a US company that is at this very moment enabling a genocide. But there are a number of other good reaons why handing our NHS over to companies like Palantir is wrong.
Why is the NHS so attractive to Palantir
Our health service is probably the biggest, comprehensive and unified National Health Service in the world. The US system is privatised and fragmented. Consequently it has ready made huge data sets that can be mined by these data companies. We freely give permission for the NHS to use our data in order to improve the service and to help research into better healthcare and medication. Today it is nto just our labor that Capital exploits but mining our personal data is the basis for a large amount of the profit generated by Big Tech
Nobody is against a more efficient use of our data or indeed using A1 in a positive, regulated way for the common good. Why does Labour insist we have to hand this over to a capitalist company like Palantir so that it can make profit from it? Is it not possible for a non profit, state financed body – a consortium of universities or research centres for example – to do the same job? In their blinkered scramble for growth at all costs Labour puts it trust in big tech without any evidence that any statistical change in Gross Domestic Product changes anything at all in relation to inequality, exploitation or the cost of living crisis.
Just like with disastrous management of our water, Labour is ideologically committed to this wasteful strategic partnership with big capital. In the recent Cunliffe inquiry into the water company crisis the option of collective ownership was specifically ruled out of the investigation. Often this private outsourcing can be absolutely catastrophic for public services – think of the Horizon scandal in the post office or the Probation service privatisation debacle.
Fighting back
People are fighting back and campaigning locally to prevent hospital trusts and other parts of the NHS developing deals with Palantir. In Hackney there was a protest outside the Town Hall during the council Health and Wellbeing board. Jeremy Corbyn organised an online meeting through his Peace and Justice Project this week where representatives from the Hackney campaign spoke.
Watching Zack Polanski today at the protest you can understand why his leadership of the Greens is winning new support. He was very articulate with the media and took the Labour government head on, He rejected accusations that opposing Palantir was just about ‘ideology’. Zack makes an effort to greet people personally and to listen to activists. Clearly his vision of the Greens is not to be just a party focussing on elections.
video of Zack’s speech
People are also beginning to see them as a credible means of stopping Reform. A recent byelection in Derbyshire saw the Greens defeat Reform and put Labour into third.place. Any idea that Starmer’s labour is any sort of bastion against the Farage surge is just an illusion. Some people inside Labour who think the Greens are some sort of green liberals or tories like to keep themselves warm with such fantasies. Your Party’s difficulties in getting organised mean that it is currently absent as a political force from all these campaigns.
Keep our NHS public were present at the protest and its leaflets put forward the key demands;
- Change legislation to increase protection for our personal health data
- For greater public investment in the NHS and academic sector for research and development that is in the public interest
- Public investment to develop publicly owned and controlled NHS data services
- No more sharing of personal health data with private companies unless there are exceptional circumstances
- Exceptional circumstances should be decided b a new, publicly accountable body, independent of government and te private sector.
Contact Keep our NHS public here: https://keepournhspublic.com/